UserFriendly: Neera and Beto giving the CCP an excuse to break necks in HK.”:

To the protestors risking their lives for democracy in Hong Kong, I want you to know: We are with you. We believe in you. And no matter who our president is, America will always be on the side of freedom.

US should drop concerns around state planning Financial Times (Vikas S). Editorial. Subhead: “The need to transition to a worker-led economy is increasingly clear.” Keep in mind that the FT, once the crisis was comfortably past, has been a vigilant promoter of neoliberal orthodoxy.

Thanks for the link (I was beginning to blame my computer!).
Yet another example of how more technology – or more complex technology – does not equal real improvement! When will people finally learn this lesson?
(This one “only” cost 10 lives. Next time, it could be more. Not to mention if there were a real battle on the horizon.)

They would be s*** hot on those things I bet with a bit of practice. Not so impossible this. I note too that the latest generation Russian tank – the T-14 Armata – is using a controller based on Sony’s Playstation gamepad instead of a traditional steering wheel.

Touchscreens are the wrong interface for this task. For example, when driving a car you learn to use controls by their feel and location, their various affordances. You lose all of this with a touch screen. You have to take your eye from the road (or your task) to touch in the right part of the screen, and you have to continue to gaze at the screen to see if it did what you needed as there is often only on-screen feedback.

The huge Tesla screen for controls is awful.

No amount of training can substitute for the natural spatial and muscle memory we all have.

Second that. I had been checking in on them from time to time, but in the last couple of months, have made it at least a weekly thing. There is always an article or a snippet that knocks my world view about.

We find that biologist and social constructionists talk past one another and never venture beyond the comfort of their own positions. Genetic studies using very few chromosomal loci find that genetic polymorphisms divide human populations into clusters with almost 100 percent accuracy and that they correspond to the traditional anthropological categories.

Conclusion

There is much to gain by recognizing that these categories differ genetically, and that we can dispense with the term race in favor of some other term such as population or ethnic group and nothing would be lost except a word.

………………………………………………………….

i.e. Genetics says that race is quite real and not pseudo construct. Time to get current with genetics and drop the social science bullshit.

The conclusions they find don’t follow from the article — because the article is just a sloppy opinion piece. In fact, it’s tendentious about the issue of clines — they cover the literature showing that in fact they don’t get “100%” clustering over many loci, but instead find a continuity at the boundaries between groups. But then they just dismiss it because if race is defined as bounded groups, then it’s obviously nonsense, so thus it can’t be, but on the other hand it is (with the 100% clustering mutterings).

Racist drivel, at the end. What can we expect from “criminologists” discussing biology? I’d rather read the journal of postmodernist philosophical ramblings.

Race is a social construct *in the US* – where very few of us came from originally, and even those are pretty mixed by now.

OTOH: “race” is an old word for “subspecies” (still used that way sometimes – eg, gardeners talk about “landraces” of cultivated plants). The functional definition of “subspecies” is: visually distinguishable regional populations. Very inexact, but useful. And in fact, the traditional “races” are just that. There are considerably more than 3, and huge populations, like India, represent transition zones. People are highly mobile, even pre-civilization, so there are few clear dividing lines. However, there are non-visible traits, like blood types, that correspond with geographic populations, and considerable local adaptation.

However, “race” has acquired so much baggage that it isn’t really a useful word any more.

One author (Anthony Walsh) is a criminologist, and the other (Ilhong Yun) is (in Korea) from Department of Police Administration. I would want to know more about their methodology and sourcing, but the article is paywalled.

There is no method. It’s just a review of standard material, reaching back to the Lewontin issues and to Ernst Meyer. So the citations are standard enough — but a citation list + an opinion piece isn’t even a good review.

It wouldn’t be publishable in a hard science field, and it lacks the analytical chops to be considered good soft science material.

It’s trivially true that there are correlated allele distribution functions for humans. It’s also true that they are cline-distributed without sharp cut-offs, and that the clines for different alleles have different poles. They affirm the former, miss the latter, and then spend the rest of the article arguing over the semantics of race.

Tiresome — people fall in a multidimensional distribution of features that doesn’t fit the traditional race concept without collapsing most of the dimensions onto the “race projection”.

There’s no popular “common sense” term for such distributions yet, because it hasn’t been part of the culture until recently.

A couple more more points while I am at it. If you are right and there are no races, then from a legal standpoint, there is no rationale whatsoever for anti-discrimination laws based on race or outward appearance.

And there is no reason when you go to the doctor to fill out a form answering questions regarding race and there is no need for medical laboratories to have different lab values for race.

National Grid ‘had three blackout near-misses in three months’ Guardian
Could it be that the fall in frequency – which can happen as a result of a loss of generation (e.g., when a unit trips unexpectedly) – was not addressed fast enough by UK’s grid operator because it does not have an appropriate set of Ancillary Services? That seems to be the (unstated) implication of this article. As the grid changes – with the addition of renewable resources – AS must also change in response to new types of technology/resource characteristics. This would be common sense and – in theory – could be done relatively easily. One would think… but no, it is not easy. Ancillary Services are yet another source of revenues for generation owners, and changing or giving up that stream of money must be resisted at all costs. Even when the grid operator says it could affect reliability.
One more reason to do a thorough and extensive investigation into what really happened in the UK. ((With more renewables, procuring sufficient amounts of appropriate AS – for example, Fast Responding Frequency Reserve – by a grid operator will be crucial. And energy storage/batteries are well suited to this function because they can respond within seconds.)

I could also be (or maybe this the same thing that you are saying) that there has been serious underinvestment in the electrical grid in order to extract as much as possible and now there is no longer sufficient grid capacity to reroute power if something drops out?

Of course the authoritarians currently running (and ruining) the UK (and Brexit) blames “Green Energy” for any failures, partly because nothing that goes wrong is something they are responsible for – despite being in power and all their cronies sitting in unelected quangos responsible for “running things” – and partly because they need to be sucking up to Donald Trump at all times for “their deal”.

Once you make the shift in thinking from, Hillary wants to be President soooooo bad, to Hillary wants to preserve her elite status, and the emoluments that appertain thereof, for as long as she can, it all begins to make sense.

‘It’s therefore a matter of the greatest moral urgency to make sure that somebody—anybody—stops Trump from winning a second term in office.’

I’ve been hearing that dog whistle from Dems since the election. Back then it was in near whispers. Now they’re out in the open. (If the Dem party would run on policies the voters want, and run a candidate that could win on those policies, there wouldn’t be any problem beating Trump in the election. imo.)

If it’s “a matter of the greatest moral urgency to make sure that somebody—anybody—stops Trump from winning a second term in office,’ heck, I’d go with the guy who has beaten Trump in 15 straight polls by a greater margin than anyone else; who has enormous grassroots support, as shown by, in the latest count, his 850,000 individual donors (roughly double the next highest candidate) all over the country; and whose policies, whether they’re called “socialist” or not, are broadly popular with the US public, “even” Trump voters (“even” in quotes because it’s not that surprising—Trump ran an anti-neoliberal, populist campaign). But that might ruffle up the big donors a bit and short-circuit the drama of the horse race so better not.

This article is enraging, but provides a very clear view of how the establishment Dem think about the plebs, and their strategy to get us to fall in line. Here are some illuminating excerpts;

“A full 70 percent approve of a public option, which would allow all Americans to buy into Medicare. This would give universal or near-universal health coverage to Americans, and amount to a massive wealth transfer from rich to poor.
These findings have emboldened progressives in the party to claim that they won’t have to pay an electoral price for embracing policies—or labels—that would have seemed unthinkable just 10 years ago.”

“Seductive as these arguments may seem, they fly in the face of compelling evidence about the kind of radicalism that American voters are—and, just as importantly, are not—willing to countenance. ”

“…voters don’t pick their preferred candidates on the basis of their specific policy proposals; rather, they ask themselves which candidates seem to advocate for their interests, and then embrace whatever policies they favor. As a result, political elites play a large role in shaping the policy preferences of ordinary voters.But public opinion is not infinitely malleable. Indeed, political scientists have also found that most voters are highly loss-averse and deeply sensitive to perceived threats to their material standing. So while they may have only vague opinions on issues that are abstract and feel distant from their daily lives, they are also likely to react strongly when they fear that they may lose a concrete benefit to which they have long been accustomed. This makes it all the more concerning that leading Democratic contenders, including Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and (at various instances) Senator Kamala Harris, have endorsed abolishing private health insurance.”

“Most Americans are strenuously opposed to socialism, and instinctively distrust candidates who make breathless promises of political revolution. But they are also deeply dissatisfied with parts of the economic system, and convinced that the people who call the shots—on Wall Street and in Washington—are exploiting that system to serve themselves. As a result, they are simultaneously open to progressive reforms that would help to transform the American economy and deeply protective of the benefits they now enjoy, including their employer-sponsored health insurance.”

“...and a narrative that emphasizes the virtues of free enterprise while attacking crony capitalism.”

“By sticking to progressive policies that are actually capable of winning broad support, Democrats will maximize their chances of defeating Trump and redressing some of the deepest injustices in the country. In 2020, progressives really can have their cake and eat it too—but only if they pay American voters the basic respect of listening to their actual views.”

Looks like Mounk reads NC!( And then twists everthing to fit the Est Dem’s goals.)

Many want to believe that they are “privileged” and belong among the “elites” and are thus prone to cognitive dissonance. I would place most of the 10% enabling class in that category.
Keeping up with the Jonses has almost always been a social motivating force in America at the least. Most advertising plays off of that willfully obscured factor in the social dynamic. Politics, as presently practiced, is just another form of advertising. I think that this was Trump’s ‘eureka’ moment; when he consciously figured the advertising angle out. I consider the fact of a Trump Administration being in power to be an affirmation of this doctrine.

I agree 100%, it is a moral urgency to stop Trump. But I also think it’s a matter of moral urgency to try with all one can to go a great deal further than that, because real social change is also a matter of moral urgency.

Other than that I’m not sure which ACTUAL programs wouldn’t be popular. Open borders? Alright, that might not be popular. But the policy being attacked is actually the single most popular policy one could possibly push (M4A). And other than that undefined “socialism” is a bad policy, well some may use the term, but that’s not a policy at all.

I must disagree about the “socialism” angle here. The “undefined socialism” of which you speak is a clear divergence from Neo-liberal Capitalism, or even Capitalism in general. It demands a different philosophy of governance. It really is ‘revolutionary’ in that word’s original sense.

“So many vows… they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It’s too much. No matter what you do, you’re forsaking one vow or the other.” –Jaime Lannister, Clash of Kings

I’d be a lot more willing to grant standing to the liberal Democrat nomenklatura for calls for “moral urgency” if (a) they weren’t so good at fomenting, and then forgetting, moral panics and (b) they showed in their practice that they consistently adhered to any moral principles at all.

The results of the official autopsy are in and here they are. They report that Epstein strangled himself to death. It was stated that he bravely tried to fight himself off but was eventually unable resist himself in the end and finally succumbed to his brutal assault. There were reports that he tried a jail break last week by taking himself hostage but these are unconfirmed.
The comedian Jimmy Dore is regretting his death as he lined up a joke how Clinton put out a tweet offering condolences over his suicide for the following Tuesday.
I have no idea why actor George Takei would say something like “This sounds like something that would happen in Russia, no?” but I am guessing that actor Walter Koenig would be seriously unimpressed. There must be something in the water in Hollywood that lets people like Takei and Morgan Freeman drink the kool-aid and believe anything that the deep state tells them.

I’ve twice tried to read Gene Wolfe, but I just can’t, which is too bad, because he’s an excellent writer. The Fifth Head of Cerberus is just too creepy for me, and I got lost in Book of the New Sun when it went all picaresque on me. Both books make me think of very, very, very bad dreams.

As I recall Robin Williams hung himself from a closet door so it’s not impossible. However if it’s true it doesn’t explain why such a famous prisoner was allowed to do so and didn’t have the required roommate.

Though, on second thoughts, I feel that “child molesting” misrepresents what he did. A better term is needed for adults who use women (or men) who are past puberty but below the age of consent. Or is there a good existing term?

“There must be something in the water in Hollywood that lets people like Takei and Morgan Freeman drink the kool-aid and believe anything that the deep state tells them.”

They’ve worked for the same team since about WWII.

Just an aside, I pretty much see entertainment in politics everywhere I look anymore. The Obama administration was regularly conflated by liberals with The West Wing, I think because they had the same delusional writers (or at least indistinguishable ones). The 2016 election was basically a remake of Caddyshack, Hillary has always reminded me more than a little of Tracy Flick, and the Trump presidency seems to be developing along Scarface lines. When he leaves office I hope he does the “say goodnight to the bad man” speech, all profanity included. That would be priceless.

This is a decent and fair review. There are a couple of points/questions I can answer.

: “(this part confused me a little. Shouldn’t number of good positions scale with population?”

Alexander pretty much answers this himself, but a current case or two may be clearer. The US only has one president, and the number of senators is limited. These are elite positions which do not scale with population, and are sought after because of the greater power that they have. At the aspirant level, it’s been years since there were too many lawyers being generated for available needs. Two decades ago I took an IU Law School class on mediation, which was being presented as an alternative income source in a competitive industry. And I’ve read of law schools increasingly hiring their graduates to boost placement rates.

> “First, they get some freedom in the civilizations they use as case studies.” And “One could make a more hostile analysis. Is it really fair to lump the Western Jin and Eastern Jin conveniently together, but separate the Western Han and Eastern Han conveniently apart?”

It’s a fair point, and needs explaining. Turchin was originally an ecologist, not a historian. From that perspective, named periods are an overlay on the underlying conditions. The criticism in the review and its comments appear to be from a historian’s perspective, focusing on the names more than the conditions.

For the authors, the search for high quality data is a primary driver. That data is unevenly distributed. For example, archaeological data is more objective than historical accounts, which are biased and exaggerate or discount according to the needs of the writer.

An exemplar of the issue can be seen in defining the anthropocene. The presence of nuclear fission products in geological strata will provide an accurate data point for future generations to within a year. But the climate effects of humans goes back farther than this, some say the industrial age and burning fossil fuels, some say thousands of years of geoforming by civilizations.

My understanding is that the authors were starting with accurate data, and that the current work on the Sheshat Databank is seeking to expand the quantity of data. The search for surrogates adds another layer to the issue. For myself, in tracking social instability in current conditions, I’ve been focusing on mass killings, which is hard data (death isn’t fuzzy), and can be well tracked. In the US, we’re over one every couple of days. New Zealand has been sparcer, and it’s easier to track both the rate and the large jump with the Christchurch shooting.

Both of them tend toward a ‘golden age’ bias, with Spengler being the source for ‘declinism’ and Toynbee directing polemics against Taggert and earlier attempts at factual analysis, rather than interesting accounts. If a good read is what your looking for, Braudel is engaging and not so bound by previous authors.

It’s not surprising the current state of analysis isn’t well-developed. Physics and chemistry have had millennia to develop testable theories. You have to start somewhere.

There’s a cognitive effect to testable theories as well. Declinism doesn’t offer room for hope or agency. Many people, here and in personal contacts, have become increasingly bitter and angry about the mass murders becoming more prevalent. They seem to become more susceptible to being divided into political tranches (‘more guns / ‘less guns’). Taking symptoms as causes.

With Turchin’s work, we have testable criteria in a short period of time. His models say social instability goes asymptotic before the next presidential inauguration. If there are increasing mass killings, it confirms the model, if there are less it disconfirms it. Testable in a relevant timeframe. A reset is also predicted in the model (this from “Ages of Discord”). There’s hope there.

This doesn’t mean he’s right. It means within two years, we’ll know if he’s right. That’s worth something.

“If there are increasing mass killings, it confirms the model, if there are less it disconfirms it.”

If there are more, it supports the model; it doesn’t confirm it. There are other potential explanations for why mass killings would rise. My own favorite is that anyone who shoots up a crowd of people gets days worth of airtime on every news channel. The media have pretty much fully given themselves over to spectacle and outrage, since that is what sells. It’s why Trump is president.

I used to wonder how the 2016 election came down to two of the most hated people in America. It seemed extraordinary to me. Now I realize that that will probably be the norm going forward.

The ArchDruid (John Michael Greer) has been discussing Spengler and Toynbee recently, to the point where I was looking into reading one or both. This is an interesting discussion.

2016 election came down to two New York billionaires. That’s “intraelite competition.”

I read Greer as well, his insights can be brilliant. It’s fair to say he’s a declinist (“collapse now, before the rush”), so his view on technology is far from UserFriendly, who is credited with bringing this link to NC. For example, peak oil didn’t work out the way he thought it would. But he’s one of only a half-dozen bloggers that I take the time to read regularly.

(ps: seeking sleep after watching ‘Under the Skin’ the other night, went to “Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift” last night for stupid fun. “DK” stands for “Drift King.” just sayin…)

Braudel is a scholar, unlike Spengler. And I really prefer Braudel’s focus on the material to Toynbee.

> With Turchin’s work, we have testable criteria in a short period of time. His models say social instability goes asymptotic before the next presidential inauguration. If there are increasing mass killings, it confirms the model,

Perhaps not “confirms,” but “supports” (which I now see others have spotted; the NC commentariat is the best commentariat).

I recall an article (which I believe predated #metoo, but I’m not positive) contrasting the Silicon Valley and San Francisco tech environs despite their similar size. There were no almost no “reported” incidents of sexual harassment in Silicon Valley whereas San Francisco had maybe less than what might be expected. Anonymously, workers in Silicon Valley described awful work environments, but the San Francisco employees mostly complained about rent prices and commuting, not the work environments themselves in the sense of sexual harassment.

One, takeaway is Silicon Valley exists purely as Silicon Valley. Its devoid of other non-tech companies and a harassed employee can’t take lunch at a lawyer’s office.

Combined with the federales not being in Silicon Valley doing the oversight that they do in other industries, the kind of corruption and ethics seen in shows such as Mad Men can still thrive in Silicon Valley. Hollywood has a similar construct. The predators and “those who go along with the crowd” know they won’t face retaliation for bad behavior or mirroring bad behavior of higher ups. Legislators make their own rules too.

As far as attorneys go, its good to know at least one, and if you don’t know one, you can be lost. Even being aware of where one can go is better than not knowing anything. This is a problem with Silicon Valley. Who is going to set up shop in Silicon Valley? You can’t fight the system on feel good vibes. Legal work does cost money.

Does anyone know if there’s any overlap between p3do/sex scandals in the UK (say, Jimmy Savile) and Epstein’s rolodex? (This is the sort of question I would have expected our famously free press to have asked and anwered.)

I’ve not seen if anyone looked at it, but Savile was something of a lone wolf I think. There certainly was a nexus of abusers in the entertainment industry in the UK from the 1960’s to 1990’s or so, but I’ve not seen any serious allegations that it went wider. It has to be said that the whole issue of paedophile networks in the UK has been thrown into confusion by many of the allegations now having been proven to be false.

However, with the Prince Andrew connection, this obviously raises questions about British Intelligence, who have been widely rumoured to have used knowledge of these networks for influence, most notoriously in the Kincora Boys Home scandal, but there have been many claims that they were aware of various senior UK politicians having ‘weaknesses’ that could be exploited. The horrendous Marc Dutroux case in Belgium is one that has widely been suspected to have had intelligence, broader network links.

How common might it be that the client of a lawyer is the only one receiving a sentence and everybody else possibly involved gets a free pass?
if i had been such a client then I’d either be an extremely good person or I’d be extremely angry person who’d fire my lawyer and get someone who’d put my interests ahead of the interests of my possible co-conspirators. Was Epstein such a nice guy that he took the fall for everybody else?
& who is now paying this lawyer to try to defend the deal? Is the defense being done for free for the possible co-conspirators?

They raid his island today?! In any case, if you suspected that Epstein’s “suicide” was going to be used to cover up crimes of the elites, you are thinking the wrong thing, as the stenographer below helpfully suggests….

“The raid was a stark reminder that the federal criminal investigation of Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking is far from over, despite his shocking Saturday death by apparent suicide in federal custody.”

So as long as people are paying attention, those in charge will continue to act out an interest in pursuing others involved. I think once attention is diverted, this will all be swept under the rug. It won’t be long before the whole sordid story slips from our collective consciousness. I want to believe that most human beings are programmed to work for the collective good. But those aberrant individuals who only work for themselves and their offspring are horrid and frightening and powerful.

They arrested him a month ago on Federal sex trafficking charges and are only now, a month later, sending the FBI to search his island for evidence? What? ( A regular person arrested for that kind of charge would have all their computer equipment – at the minimum – confiscated immediately.)

If it is theater, it is terribly blatant and not very convincing theater. But it only has to convince the corporate press, who then manage the narrative on their own. If there existed in the US even *one* mainstream and independent media outlet all sorts of questions would be raised that are tactfully left unasked by today’s CIA stenographers.

And what about his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico? ( Maybe bill richardson is taking care of that for them.)

Or his Palm Beach residence.

Or his apartment in Paris.

My guess is they’ll slow walk this until they can replace the whole damn sordid story with “outrage” at labor shortages and “irregularities” at MCC, which is run by the department of prisons, which is controlled by the department of justice, which is run by attorney general Bill Barr, who was appointed by Donald Trump, who said epstein was a nice guy in 2002, which means his death is Trump’s fault, which means he had something on Trump, which means Trump and Barr are trying to cover all this up.

PS. MCC seems to have been functional enough to keep El Chapo Guzman alive long enough (over 2 years) to stand trial and be transferred to his final destination. Ditto for Paul Manafort as well as a number of other high “value” inmates.

The world’s most notorious drug kingpin has a new home, a place were he cannot escape or do business, a dreaded stronghold in lower Manhattan sometimes called the Guantanamo of New York.

When I saw this story and saw pictures of the FBI men dashing around on golf buggies I just laughed. Who do they think they are kidding? They really do hold a low opinion of the population, don’t they?

A little late to storm Pedo Island, dontcha think? Two weeks for the bad guys to remove all evidence and scrub it clean. As soon as they found kiddie porn at the NY mansion, any judge would have granted a warrant to serve upon all of Epstein’s properties, including those in New Mexico and France.

RE: Climate Could Be an Electoral Time Bomb, Republican Strategists Fear

Trey Bagley, 25, readily acknowledged climate science. But Mr. Bagley, a sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserves wearing a “Trump 2020, Make Liberals Cry Again” shirt said that did not make him a Democrat.

“I completely agree that we’re offending the climate,” Mr. Bagley said. “But the solutions that are being introduced to fix it are going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.”

This article makes it seem like there’s no conservative policy for climate change but it’s right there on this guy’s shirt: own the libs! Offend the climate! Are you triggered, Arctic permafrost?

I see the $1,000 working if it were understood as a dividend of sorts and did not affect existing welfare benefits and social security. The money would be meaningless to high-income and high-wealth individuals but would enable families and others to live their same lifestyle without incurring debt. So any slightly inflationary effect of the monthly disbursement (if we care about that) would be offset (for us regular dudes and dudettes) by a lower debt ratio.

But who are the BIG losers in a slightly inflationary and less indebted economy? The owners and financiers of debt of course! The Banks!

So this makes me very skeptical of the feasibility of a Yang style plan. If it went through, it would go through in a way that screwed the people over to save the debt profiteers or Chase and Wells Fargo.

Disgraceful behaviour. If I’d been the judge I’d have said that the chap had already been locked up for years in the embassy, which was punishment enough for jumping bail, and that the Swedish rape case at best involved one of those silly PC non-crimes, and at worst was merely fraudulent. I’d have let the fellow walk free.

Just a casual reading on Epstein and his 1st level connections to various “known entities” within the conspiratorial world, i.e. the Tri-Lateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, the US intelligence community, the Mossad, the Rothschilds, and he’s veritable gold mine for conspiracy theorists looking to tie him in to almost anything they want. I honestly had to stop reading after about an hour as it was just too much and I knew I would turn up some sort of Templar or Rosicrucian link without much effort.
I’ve spent a lot of time following and reading various theories purely as entertainment; the amount of creativity and effort behind some of them is really interesting. Epstein take the cake though, there’s a good 2-3 generations worth of theories that can come from him.

The number of good positions does not scale with population, as the Turchin discussion above urges.

Honestly, he’s organizing conferences with scientists and then, in the middle of meetings and presentations, young women, plural, come in to massage his back. What on earth were the scientists thinking? Funding, I know.

‘Using the Lord’s name in vain’: Jeff Sharlet’s books on The Family (recently made into a 5 part documentary series on Netflix) explain wonderfully why Trump’s vulgarity isn’t going to be a fatal hit against him in most Evangelical circles, I think, even outside The Family.

Sharlet’s books are good. But based on the Rolling Stone review posted in Saturday’s links, and the informative comments by reader Urblintz, I think the Netflix documentary might be flawed. Just a heads up.

Oh, there are flaws. The documentary looks at role of the Family (via US politicians) in provoking various kinds of regressive laws across the world and involves a visit to Eastern Europe. Some time was spent on the Maria Butina case, which invited them to veer perilously close to full-on Russiagate idiocy. They didn’t go all-in.

There was a place called ‘Bear Hill’ in the main part of Sequoia NP in the Giant Forest where the bruins were fed daily, and 4 grandstands were set up with space in between them to allow them to saunter in for a meal, and it worked great, the restaurant got rid of leftover food from diners plates and the tourists were afforded a no doubt about it chance to see them, and this went on from around 1910 to 1940, when the practice was finally stopped.

To this day, if you leave any food out there in nearby Lodgepole campground, bears will be on it like flies on scat, despite it being 80 years since they stopped feeding them…

Conversely about 20 miles away as the crow flies, in Mineral King they were never fed, as their diet is the usual fare of grubs and whatever else they can scare up. I can’t think of any bear break ins that have happened there, it’s more the marmots’ turf.

“Barnum became one of the most celebrated men in America not despite his bigotry and duplicity, his flimflamming and self-dealing, but because of them. He didn’t so much fool the public as indulge it.”

I have the gift of prophecy. I looked at this title, looked at where it was published, and predicted that the theme would be “there is a deplorable born every minute.” And I was right! Perhaps I should get an act together.

According to the article, in today’s money Barnum made tens of millions in Europe, then lost it back home, and made another fortune in Europe. Americans were not the only ones who liked what he was selling.

“What a Protest in Hong Kong Looks Like When Pro-Democracy Marchers Lose Their Fear of the Police”

Very well put together video that with professional standards on it. Very professional. In fact, I tried an experiment with it. I located a YouTube page with the Hell March (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=—g-f_I2yQ) music in it – ironically set to a Chinese military parade – on another tab. So I started the music on it, went back to that Protest video on the first tab and started it but killed the sound on it. Thus you had the protest video playing with the Hell March music playing. Still works as a video.

Meanwhile, some of the protestors are doing themselves no favours with stunts like this-

Saw an interview with the guy pictured in the article on MSNBS yesterday. He essentially said that while he knew things would be tough for those who’d lost their jobs, he needed one.

Another interview asked a young white guy “why” he was applying for a job at the plant. He said he was working “fast food” for minimum wage and needed a better job. (Guess it never occurred to him that he could learn to code.)

It would certainly be a “shame” if it turned out that this idea of “jobs americans won’t do” turned out to be a load of phoney baloney.

I think its less that Trump would gain support and more that he would reinforce a narrative of Team Blue using ID politics in a cynical fashion. The GOP is pretty heinous, and I’m largely convinced the huge 2012 black turnout wasn’t an embrace of Obama as much as it was a reaction to the brazen efforts of the GOP to block minorities from voting. The GOP has become slightly less publicly egregious and managed to get away with their vote blocking efforts. Admittedly, “OMG Russia” ate up a good deal of energy that should have addressed this situation.

Obama’s taking it personally announcement towards African Americans in 2014 didn’t energize the black vote, but I don’t see the current GOP gaining votes.

Like the fraudulent “immigration reform of 2006” (a proposed slave labor act that had bipartisan support), GOP efforts at out reach to various voting blocs have been so toxic I doubt anyone can gain going forward. Its still a Southern/libertarian rump party that has been allowed to exist because of the dismantling of the Democratic Party by Obama and then handed over to the Clintons who destroyed 50 years of a Democratic Congress on their first day on the job in their first go round.

JohnnyGL, apropos of that,
“…a new NBER study suggests that immigration has more far-reaching consequences than merely depressing wages and lowering employment rates of low-skilled African-American males: its effects also appear to push some would-be workers into crime and, later, into prison…The 1980-2000 immigrant influx, therefore, generally ‘explains’ about 20 to 60 percent of the decline in wages, 25 percent of the decline in employment, and about 10 percent of the rise in incarceration rates among blacks with a high school education or less.”

…their analysis finds that a 10 percent rise in immigrants in a particular skill group significantly trimmed the wages of black and white men alike. For African-Americans, the decline was 3.6 percent. For whites, it was actually slightly higher: 3.8 percent. Beyond that, however, the black-white experience differed markedly, especially for low-skilled workers. Take employment rates: from 1960 to 2000, black high school dropouts saw their employment rates drop 33 percentage points — from 88.6 percent to 55.7 percent — the authors found in their analysis of census data from 1960 to 2000. The decrease for white high school dropouts was only roughly half that — from 94.1 percent to 76.0 percent.”https://www.nber.org/digest/may07/w12518.html

In 1995, laying drywall was paid $15-20 per sheet of 8X12. By 2001, there were very few US drywall installers left in construction; the workers had become all Mexican and Central Americans working for between $3-5 per sheet. Few of them were legal, as they all would scatter when the green Border Patrol jeeps arrived.

Democrats are insane for making generous migration policies the hill to die on for 2020. And the US will never get a European-style social welfare net as long as the American migration system is broken.

By very definition, a government has to discriminate (citizen v. non-citizen) to have Medicare4All, safety net, free education, etc.

your mileage may vary and agree to disagree cuz presumably this sentiment is to the right of many here.

In regards to the Navy article, it blows me away that engineers, which I am one (civil engineer), are obsessed with the bright and shiny and have completely thrown KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid, right out the window. This goes right into the heart of crapification.

I think a pair of throttles beats a touch screen every day of the week. The TechCrunch article says the fleet has been begging for throttles back. Amen.

Small potatoes compared to airplane controls with lives dependent on them but here is my story. I have a touch screen in my car – dials the phone, plays the radio and music from a phone or iPod, etc. When I first get in the car when it is very cold outside or very hot it just plain does not work. At random other times it also just stops responding or will kind of respond when pressed very hard. For a while I was calling it my “press as hard as you can screen” Got some laughs at the Subaru (car is a 2013 Imprezza) dealership with that one. Subaru more or less refuses to acknowledge the problem The odd forum talks about some kind of re-boot but of course you lose your phone connection and contacts and have to do all that from scratch – all with no guarantee that it will work.
First world problem I know, but give me buttons and knobs any day.

How about a touch screen, in the shape of a knob… and when your fingers grasp the touch screen around the sides and make a turning motion, then the touch sensitive surface picks that up and digitally transmits the control instruction up or down depending on how you ‘turn’ the knob. And also the touch screen gives some kind of haptic feedback to make your fingers feel like they are actually turning a real knob.

Let’s see. The coalition calls for an immediate ceasefire in Aden and also called on all military groups to immediately return to their positions and retreat from areas that have been seized over the past few days. I am going to nominate this as unintentionally hilarious. The Saudis got their clocks cleaned the past few days and I even heard that they were using their special forces to try to stop Aden falling without success. And now they want a do-over with everybody going back to their original places? Yeah, that is really going to happen. Aden always was a tough place. The British use to control it but when they left back in 1967 they had to basically shoot their way out of the place.

A fellow I know who has a camp (cottage) up near Blind River claims that once a bear discovers the food source within the camp that only killing the bear will resove the problem. Rather extreme.
Another fellow had trouble with his camp because human visitors used a chainsaw to cut through the walls of his padlocked escape from the dangers of city living.
We’ve had bears in our yard in the city where we live which is, to be precise, back of the beyond in the middle of nowhere. Banging on pot lids usually send the bears scurrying away.
From what I know about burglars they are usually gone before pot lids or police can do much of anything.

RE: Alejandro Giammattei, a Conservative, Wins Guatemala’s Presidency New York Times. Resilc: “I’ve only visited 40 countries, but it was the worst overall in bad everything and zero hope.”

When The Mountains Tremble
Filmed in 1982 at the height of the Guatemalan Army’s repression against the Mayan indigenous people, has become a classic political documentary. It describes the struggle of the largely Indian peasantry against a heritage of state and foreign oppression. Centered on the experiences of Rigoberta Menchú, who later became a Nobel Peace laureate, the overall effect of the film is exhilarating. With clarity and energy it conveys the birth of a national and political awareness.

Saint Ronnie (RayGun) and his sidekick Elliot Abrams in the 80’s, but goes much further back – United Fruit Co. and their henchmen, the Dulles bros. in the 50’s, and before that… Any wonder there is zero hope?

Seems sensible – why should we welcome immigrants who will be a charge on society? Ask anyone who immigrated as a DP (displaced person from post-ww2 ethnic cleansing) how much assistance they got when they got off the boat. As much as they expected – none. They expected to work hard in their new country and they did. They were contributors who made society better. They would have been embarrassed to take welfare.

From what I remember there were more job opportunities and some relief that the displaced persons had escaped from their situations with their lives. Many were sponsored by future employers provided that work at low wages was completed as contracted, many came from backgrounds in which they were employed in industrial labours or had hope of either steady work or advancement after they or their children had learned English or been educated in regular public schools.
Nor were there many offers of any help instead of jobs or church charities.
You are talking about the postwar fifties, are you not?
Yet there were still many comments against the “damned d.p’s” sticking together and taking jobs from “us’ and changing our way of schooling and recreation and not even speaking English in the public parks being invaded.
Further, the people who came from one country weren’t fond of those from other countries with whom historical grudges and slights were current.
Good times? Yeh, superficially, perhaps. Or relatively.

Yes well I have family members who were DP’s and they had a very rough time, yes they were discriminated against, even losing their job when a local showed up needing work but they got right up and kept going sans welfare which they wouldn’t have applied for even if it was available which it was not.

I’m starting to look into the history of public assistance to non-citizens through the years. Here are 2 links indicating that restrictions for non-citizens became more prevalent in the later 20th century.

Regarding the second link, I did come across references to the work programs (WPA, CCC) not being available to non-citizens (and also discriminated against non-white citizens).

On the one hand, those who support welfare benefits for non-citizens point out that at the time of the 1996 reforms, legal non-citizens enjoyed access to a wide range of welfare benefits. This access was based on the principle that non-citizens come to America to participate in the full range of American social, economic, and political life and that, with modest exceptions, they should be treated like other Americans. The children of non-citizens, the vast majority of whom are American citizens, are especially deserving of the safety net provided by welfare programs. Supporters believe that to deny non-citizens and their children welfare benefits is to leave them outside the protective sphere of social welfare guaranteed to the disabled and destitute by federal and state government policy. Moreover, like other Americans, non-citizens pay taxes, and unlike non-citizens in many other countries, can be drafted in time of war.

When the modern welfare state was established in 1935, there were no federal laws barring non-citizens, even unauthorized immigrants, from social assistance. States were free to enact their own alienage-based restrictions on jointly funded programs, but in 1970 only Texas required Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and Medicaid recipients to be U.S. citizens. Arizona and eight other states barred non-citizens from some of their other welfare programs, but the vast majority of states did not ask applicants about their legal status. And welfare officials interpreted federal law to prohibit cooperation between welfare and immigration officials. All of this changed during the Nixon administration…

“On the one hand, those who support welfare benefits for non-citizens point out that at the time of the 1996 reforms, legal non-citizens enjoyed access to a wide range of welfare benefits. This access was based on the principle that non-citizens come to America to participate in the full range of American social, economic, and political life and that, with modest exceptions, they should be treated like other Americans.”

Wish I weren’t getting so old that it was impossible to remember who ruled in 96.
It MUST have been some evil repug, who detest all the poors, eh?

Evangs give me the chills, obsessing over a figment of their imagination’s name being spoken in public in a non reverent fashion by glorious leader, and yet they’re ok with real things going down that are utterly despicable.

“God” isn’t even His name. His name is YHWH, because Hebrew, like Arabic, normally does not write vowels. It’s usually rendered as Yahweh by people who don’t respect the rule not to say it. Used to be Jehovah, because for some reason the ‘J’ is supposed to be pronounced like ‘Y’. The Arabic word for “god” is “lah,” and “al” means “the,” and since there can only be one, “al lah” means “the god,” because they, too, believe His name should not be spoken. Nobody really seems to know what “in vain” means in the Commandment, so they just interpreted the rule as never speaking the name. Bunch of ignorant prigs.

There always have been rules where you agree not to become a public ward before you immigrate. Trump is just trying to pretend that he’s come up with something new.
American immigration policy has always been aimed at procuring cheap labor for corporations and to steal exceptional scientists from other countries. The immigrants do prosper here because they make a lot more money here than in their former country (albeit at a lower salary vis a vis their American counterparts) and they do hard.

On the screen time and the excess sugar articles: here is an anecdote. My vision recently became horrible; really blurry, especially in the last month or so. Yes, I’m 55 y.o.; I use reading glasses. But this was ridiculous; I had to put on two pairs of reading glasses, one on top of another. I called my optometrist, whom I’m to see anyway in a couple of weeks, and he told me not to worry, that it was just my age-related nearsightedness getting worse. But I knew it wasn’t (doctors are often morons).

I figured out that the problem corresponded to eating fruit. But this made no sense. I have a home blood sugar monitor, and my blood glucose level does not go up unduly after eating fruit.

So I posted on a diabetes website. And, someone out there knew the answer. Sorbitol. Cherries and nectarines are in season. I’ve been eating a lot of them. They are really high in sorbitol. Which is horrible for your eyes. It just sits there; it takes forever for your body to get rid of it. And maybe I’m extra sensitive. So it’s been 36 hours since I’ve eaten high sorbitol fruit, and my vision is back to middle aged person vision, which at this point seems wonderful.

Can someone please explain to the willfully ignorant Margaret Sullivan that Bezos’ intervention was made at the hiring decision?

If Bezos had to do things as ham-handedly as hosting weekly conference calls to discuss which stories should be covered and which shouldn’t and how the coverage should be shaped, then it would basically tell us that Bezos is an incompetent hiring manager and/or an idiotic micro-manager.

Since you don’t often become the richest man in the galaxy by being an idiot, it’s safe to suggest he’s not an idiot.

Nice legerdemain there by the author – attempting to draw our focus to the geologic-time brevity of the industrial age, and to conclude form that that the long-term impacts will be similarly vanishingly small: “Very little of our handiwork will survive the obliteration of the ages.”

Newsflash: the Chicxulub impact event, including the subsequent tsunamis rippling around the globe, lasted on the order of a mere day. Did earth recover? Yes. But the impact changed things forever, including allowing a species of small shrew-like burrowing mammals to evolve to fill the ecological niches vacated by the demise of the dinosaurs, one of which evolutionary branches led to us, who are now busily causing the next global mass extinction event.

So while whatever intelligent species – if any – eventually evolves out of the devastation we leave behind as our legacy may not decide to classify our current era with a geologic-epochal designation, rest assured that will not mitigate our destructive legacy. Does what the Atlantic author’s disingenous spiel boils down to, “It should really be the Anthropocene mass extinction event” make you fell better? To quote from the scene at Elvis’ Graceland-mansion gravesite in This Is Spinal Tap, “Yeah, it really puts things in persepctive … too much f***ing perspective.”

I’m just ashamed of my fellow countryfolk. I really am. What a bunch of brown-nosers we’ve become. I don’t why Amazon gets my goat more than any of the other giant multi-billion dollar industries choking the last breath out of the system, but I sure hope I live long enough to see that whole entity go down.

Is it Exceptionalism = Mass Murder, or is it Only American Exceptionalism = Mass Murder?

Can we say, German Exceptionalism = Mass Murder?

Or Turkish Exceptionalism = Masss Murder?

What about Chinese Exceptionalism?

And since we are reading more and more about the coming, or already here, Russia-China strategy, we can also ask if Russian Exceptionalism = Mass Murder? Or is some national exceptionalism more special, more exceptional, such that native populations are not murdered?

Perhaps comparing how much of each nation’s exceptionalism is designated for export will help … and there’s also the “before you go out and try to fix the rest of the world, try putting your own house in order” aspect.

But getting back to the export issue, I know you love throwing out vague “other guys bad, too” conversational chaff, but some homework for you, since you yourself asked the “more special” question:

Homework Problem: For each country you name, tally up the estimated body count caused in other nations since WW2 by said country, and use the resulting totals to produce a rank ordering of mass-murder exceptionalism.

I think you’re confusing exceptionalism with nationalism and/or chauvinism. Most countries experience some form of the latter. It’s only the USA that prides itself on projecting the former, often at the point of a gun.

That “Climate could be an electoral time bomb, Republican strategists fear” article mentioned a new-ish group called American Conservation Coalition which is seeking a way to make climate concerns tolerable to Conservatives and expressible in Conservative language and thought-patterns.